I do a lot of arranging and composing in Dorico.
Often I need to be able to play my keyboard with a piano sound when arranging for wood wind or choir, to be able to hear certain harmonies where a flute path will sound awkward. So I thought if it would be possible to have a function in Dorico, that would let me switch between the instrument that I’m currently editing AND a predefined instrument (piano) that could kind of act as my grand, like in the old (not good old!) days where I did my arrangements at the piano.
You know press esc to get out of input mode and then maybe an a to switch to piano sound, and when the testing of the arrangement is finished hit the enter again, to continue to input notes.
A secondary option could be to let the user decide, that whenever Dorico is NOT in input mode, the midi thru should be playing the piano sound.
LOL, I just requested this very thing a week ago on this thread too:
My workaround is to have a piano sound running in the background using a Garritan sound in Aria. I have Voicemeeter running too as it is a freeware program that will allow multiple ASIO streams. (I’m sure there are others as well.) This way whenever I touch my keyboard I hear the Garritan piano sound, even with Dorico running. To shut the Dorico sounds on/off, I just hit F3 to bring up the mixer, click “m” to mute/unmute it above the output slider, and press F3 again to hide the mixer.
Being able to set MIDI Thru to the piano sound as I do in Finale would be a very welcome feature for me as well.
As a side-note to this, I use an app called DLS-Midi-Synth, from the Mac App Store, which basically hooks up your MIDI keyboard to MacOS’s built-in General MIDI samples.
That way, even when Dorico/Logic/etc isn’t running or setup, I always have sounds at hand. And if my Dorico instruments are a bit ethereal, I still have a piano to fall back on.
Since this thread was posted, I wonder if further developments have addressed this issue? New to Dorico, I like to write using a piano sound (I suspect others of my generation do too..) and hear playback with the actual sounds. Especially in orchestral scores with many staves in galley view, scrolling down to click on the piano staff to hear that sound all the time becomes a drag. My workaround is to have Finale running with piano at the same time and disable midi thru in Dorico, which works OK but not ideal for a few reasons. A great feature request would be a simple function to toggle playback to piano (like the fixed midi thru in Fn) which could be assigned a key command. Hoping for this one day soon.
Mike